sunna,SunnahArabic“habitual practice”also spelled Sunnah (Arabic: “habitual practice”), Sunna the body of traditional social and legal custom and practice of the Muslim community. Islamic community. Along with the Qurʾān (the holy book of Islam) and Hadith (recorded sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), it is a major source of Sharīʿah, or Islamic law.

In pre-

Islāmic

Islamic Arabia,

sunna

the term sunnahreferred to precedents established by tribal ancestors, accepted as normative

,

and practiced by the entire community. The early Muslims did not immediately concur on what constituted their

sunna

Sunnah. Some looked to the people of Medina for an example

,

; others followed the behaviour of the

Companions of Muḥammad,

companions of the Prophet Muhammad; whereas the provincial legal schools, current in Iraq, Syria, and the Hejaz (in Arabia) in the 8th century

AD

CE, attempted to equate

sunna

Sunnah with an ideal system—based partly on what was traditional in their respective areas and partly on precedents that they themselves had developed. These varying sources, which created differing community practices, were finally reconciled late in the 8th century by the legal scholar Abū ʿAbd Allāh ash-Shāfiʿī (767–820), who accorded the

sunna

Sunnah of the Prophet

Muḥammad,

Muhammad as preserved in eyewitness records of his words, actions, and approbations

, and known as the Ḥadīth,

(the Hadith) normative and legal status second only to that of the Qurʾān.

The authoritativeness of the sunna Sunnah was further strengthened when Muslim scholars, in response to the wholesale fabrication of hadiths by supporters of various doctrinal, legal, and political positions, developed ʿilm ʿilm al-ḥadīthḥadīth, the science of attesting the authenticity of individual traditions. The sunna Sunnah was then used in tafsīr ,(Qurʾānic exegesis, ) to supplement the meaning of the text , and in fiqh , Islāmic (Islamic jurisprudence, ) as the basis of legal decisions not discussed in the Qurʾān.See also ʿilm al-ḥadīth; tafsīr.